Stereotyping on the Streets

Are San Diego police officers racist? Depends on who you ask. While most cops here are good cops, and while the San Diego Police Department certainly isn’t notorious for racial intolerance, many African-Americans and Latinos will tell you they’ve been unfairly stopped while driving, simply because of their color. This lamentable law-enforcement practice, known nationwide as racial profiling or, more derisively, as “DWB”—driving while black (or brown)—does occur in San Diego.

The most highly publicized DWB incident here was about three years ago, when former San Diego Chargers defensive lineman Shawn Lee was pulled over by an officer of the Regional Auto Theft Task Force, a special unit staffed by officers from a number of local law enforcement agencies. The officer ordered Lee and his girlfriend out of the car, handcuffed them and detained them for half an hour on the side of Interstate 15.

At the time, the officer said Lee was stopped because he was driving a vehicle fitting the description of one stolen earlier that evening. But Lee was in a Jeep Cherokee, a sports utility vehicle; the vehicle reported stolen was a Honda sedan. He and his girlfriend were released without being charged with any crime, but Lee subsequently filed a federal lawsuit, which has yet to be resolved.

Another high-profile San Diego African-American, boxer Terry Norris, says he’s been stopped at least 10 times and harassed by police because he drives an expensive Mercedes. “Whenever they stop me, they act rude at first and think of a reason they’re pulling me over, like my headlights are too powerful. But they always ask me if the car is mine,” says Norris, a former world junior middleweight champion who retired from the ring in 1999 and now lives in Alpine.

“When they realize who I am, they turn nice,” he says. “One even asked for my autograph. It’s pretty frustrating. The last time it happened was in July. So, in spite of what police are saying, I wouldn’t say the situation has improved much.”

Adds his wife, Amy, who is white, “Whenever I’ve been stopped driving the same car, no one ever asks me if this is my car. It’s really unfair, the way Terry is treated.”

Such complaints from the community and from the American Civil Liberties Union prompted local police to launch a study last year that looked at the races of motorists stopped by police and examined more than 91,500 traffic stops from January through June. Hoping to allay any community perception that racial profiling occurs here, San Diego police were among the first in the nation to voluntarily record the race and ethnicity of every driver stopped.

“The information collected will help San Diego Police and the community achieve a better understanding of police practices to ensure that all persons are treated fairly,” says the report. The preliminary results, released in September, show that while African-Americans and Latinos represent about 30 percent of the driving population, they represent 40 percent of drivers stopped and 70 percent of those searched. Two-thirds of all stops occurred during daylight hours, when the color of a driver’s skin is more easily discerned.

Police and others say it’s too early to draw any conclusions. The study will look at a full year’s worth of stops before a final report is issued later this year. But officers interviewed by reporters denied they stopped vehicles according to drivers’ skin color. And they offered a variety of reasons for the study’s results: They patrolled the neighborhoods of minority racial and ethnic groups. Mexican visitors boosted the number of Latinos on the road. They were noticing the traffic infraction, not the color of the driver’s skin.

And San Diego’s Joseph Wambaugh, the best-selling author and former Los Angeles cop, comes to the officers’ defense. “This is not just about race. It’s age profiling, and sex profiling, and race profiling,” he argues. “As police attempt to cull potential lawbreakers from honest citizens, sex, age, race, clothing and lots of other subtleties go into the process.”

Adds Wambaugh, “If you say it’s all about race, I’ll ask you this: How many African-American grandmothers do you think cops pull over?”

The Vehicle Stop Study, championed by former SDPD Chief Jerry Sanders, has received the continued support of current Chief David Bejarano. Daniel Eaton, president of the San Diego Black Bar Association and a San Diego Civil Service commissioner, had been a vocal advocate for such a study for years. Six years ago—just two weeks after being named president of the Black Bar—Eaton was stopped by a cop just a few blocks from Eaton’s San Diego beach home.

“The officer stopped me, presumably for a traffic violation,” says Eaton, “but he didn’t say a word to me. He told me to get out of the car, and only after he looked at my driver’s license did he say anything to me of substance. He said, ‘Oh, you live around here?’ It was obvious to me he was not stopping me just on a routine traffic stop.”

Since then, Eaton has argued that police here should be monitored. “No one is claiming the San Diego Police Department is full of racist cops,” says Eaton. “Sometimes I think police don’t even realize they are doing it. Some police officers just act. It works on a more subconscious level.”

The issue of police and race is getting lots of attention in Oceanside, too. In November, newly elected Mayor Terry Johnson, San Diego County’s first black mayor, said that city’s 167-member police department suffers from “deep-rooted racism and sexism.” Oceanside cops have heatedly denied the charge, collectively and individually.

Nationwide, police profiling has become a major issue. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a recent independent study found that black drivers received 39 percent of the more than 51,000 traffic citations issued in the first 11 months of last year. Only 19 percent of licensed drivers in Raleigh are black.

And in New Jersey, Governor Christine Todd Whitman, recently nominated by President Bush to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is still being dogged by continuing allegations that New Jersey State Police officers targeted minority motorists for traffic stops and vehicle searches. Last year, there was further criticism after the release of a 1996 picture showing a smiling Whitman frisking a black youth in Camden, New Jersey.

However, several police departments are following San Diego’s lead and addressing the issue head-on. In December, more than 40 police chiefs and police union leaders in Arizona, a state not historically known for its egalitarian politics, signed a declaration condemning racial profiling and calling for education and training of officers and citizens to communicate better and avoid misunderstandings.

Back home, Chief Bejarano seems committed to ending all racial profiling by cops under his watch. His evident sincerity doesn’t mean the problem will soon go away, but even many of the PD’s harshest critics seem to agree the problem is being addressed, and that the situation here is a far cry from that in Raleigh or Camden.

—Jamie Reno

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